The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (336 page)

After
Wholly Moses
(80, Gary Weis), he produced and wrote
Bustin’ Loose
(81, Oz Scott). Then he was in
Some Kind of Hero
(82, Michael Pressman);
The Toy
(82, Richard Donner);
Superman III
(83, Richard Lester); and
Brewster’s Millions
(85, Walter Hill). He then wrote, produced, directed, and acted in the autobiographical
Jo Jo Dancer Your Life Is Calling
(86). Since then, he has appeared in
Critical Condition
(87, Michael Apted);
Moving
(88, Alan Metter);
Harlem Nights
(89, Eddie Murphy), as Murphy’s father; with Gene Wilder again in
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
(89, Hiller);
Another You
(91, Maurice Phillips); and in
Lost Highway
(96, David Lynch).

Vsevolod Illareonovitch Pudovkin
(1893–1953), b. Penza, Russia
1921:
Golod … Golod … Golod
(codirected with Vladimir Gardin) (d). 1925:
Shakhmatnaya Goryachka/Chess Fever
(codirected with Nikolai Shpikovsky) (s). 1926:
Mekhanika Golovnovo Mozga
(d);
Mat/Mother
. 1927:
Konets Sankt/The End of St. Petersburg
(codirected with Mikhail Doller). 1928:
Potomok Chingis Khan/Storm Over Asia/The Heir to Genghis Khan
. 1932:
Prostoi Sluchai
(codirected with Doller). 1933:
Desertir
. 1938:
Pobeda
(codirected with Doller). 1939:
Minin i Pozharskii
(codirected with Doller). 1940:
Kino za Dvadtsat Let/Twenty Years of Soviet Cinema
(codirected with Esther Shub) (d). 1941:
Suvurov
(codirected with Doller);
Pir v Zhirmunka
(codirected with Doller). 1942:
Ubiitsy Vykhodyat na Dorogu
(codirected with Yuri Tarich). 1943:
Vo Imya Rodiny
(codirected with Dmitri Vasiliev). 1946:
Admiral Nakhimov
(codirected with Vasiliev). 1948:
Tri Vstrechi
(codirected with Sergei Yutkevich and Alexander Ptushko). 1950:
Zhukovsky
(codirected with Vasiliev). 1953:
Vozvrashchienle Vasilya Bortnikova
.

Having studied physics and chemistry at Moscow University, Pudovkin was wounded in the war and spent three years in a German prison camp. Soon after his release, he went to the State Film School and became a pupil of Vladimir Gardin and Lev Kuleshov. He assisted both men and also acted for them. In addition, his training under Kuleshov led to the material for his two books on cinematic theory:
Film Technique
and
Film Acting
.

It was Pudovkin who made famous the experiments in which Kuleshov intercut shots of Mosjukhin with shots of a bowl of soup, a coffin, and a child to produce quite different emotional meanings. Pudovkin was especially intrigued by the way in which narratives could be altered by a simple change of shot order. But it followed that he thought of each shot as a static, fixed quality. Indeed, he first used algebraic terms to suggest the effects of montage.

By the time he made
The End of St. Petersburg
, Pudovkin had achieved a very rapid cutting style, but the shots themselves remain rigid, rattling together like trucks in a freight train. Attributions of “poetic” or “emotional” qualities in Pudovkin now seem very fanciful. His films are more the work of a blackboard theoretician who arranges events into neat equations: in
Mother
, the crosscutting of the revolutionary march and the breaking up of the ice floe; and in
The End of St. Petersburg
between Russian losses in the war and frantic speculation on the stock exchange at home. The former is mere rabble-rousing, showing the propagandist excesses of the Kuleshov experiment and suffering from the grandiose vagueness of Russian cinema. The latter, too, is a tendentious, literary comparison; one has only to think of the stock exchange sequence in Antonioni’s
The Eclipse
to see how much more complex the same location can be.

That comparison is not remote. It shows that cinema has a duty to location above and beyond the adherence to any theory of montage. It matters little in
The End of St. Petersburg
that Pudovkin has insisted on actors whose experience is like that of his characters. That sort of authenticity is a sop to insecure dogma; amateurs can overact as much as professionals, while all actors are misled by fallacies in conception and method.

As with most of the Russian theories on editing, the case is confounded by academic, lifeless films, by the special pleading of political bias, and by the reminder that elsewhere far greater films were being made without such shaky justification. Whether or not
Mother
conforms to classic montage is an arid question beside the astonishing and subtle language of
The General, Underworld
, or
Sunrise
, made at much the same time. Unlike Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, or Dovzhenko, Pudovkin used images in an invariably dull way—the photographed storyboard, relying on the clinching significance of a + b, and very slow for all that the cutting is often so fast.

There is one saving, if accidental, virtue in Pudovkin’s writing. From his theory of montage he deduced that the movie actor could be passive. His animation was irrelevant compared with the spark obtained in a cut. That argument led to advice to the actor that finds itself, by chance, on the bull’s-eye. For this, and much else in the same vein, Pudovkin may still be read, so long as one looks not to his films but to Bresson, Hitchcock, or Sternberg for the demonstration:

Extremely interesting are those passages in Stanislavsky’s memoirs where he speaks of the necessity for “gestureless” movements of immobility on the part of the actor, to concentrate on his feelings all the attention of the spectator.

Stanislavsky felt that an actor striving towards truth should be able to avoid the element of portraying his feelings to the audience, and should be able to transmit to it the whole fullness of the content of the acted image in some moment of half-mystic communion. Of course he came up against a brick wall in his endeavors to find a solution to this problem in the theatre.

It is amazing that solution of this very problem is not only not impracticable in the cinema, but extreme paucity of gesture, often literal immobility, is absolutely indispensable in it.

That literal immobility that Pudovkin desired in an actor was something he assumed in his audience. Although Soviet cinema is learnedly propagandist, it is based on naïve attitudes about how audiences relate to film. The sort of quiescence in actors that true cinema exploits derives from the realization that films and actors belong to the fantasies of audiences. It sees film as near to dream: whereas in Russia it was like a broadsheet.

Bill Pullman
, b. Hornell, New York, 1953
Bill Pullman has charm and intelligence to spare, as well as a real comic edge, but I’m not sure that it isn’t his strategy to stay cool, good-looking, and hidden (or blank) in the knowledge that those limitations can these days set up a fair career as a leading man. He has done a serious number of films, but seems reluctant to reveal himself, as if that kind of excess or vanity could take him out of the mainstream category of OK, safe guys. In which case, his amiable survival may reflect our own lack of concern or involvement: never better or funnier than in his debut,
Ruthless People
(86, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker);
Spaceballs
(87, Mel Brooks);
The Serpent and the Rainbow
(88, Wes Craven);
Rocket Gilbraltar
(88, Daniel Petrie); the publisher in
The Accidental Tourist
(88, Lawrence Kasdan)—note, Pullman is the cool star now just as William Hurt is the difficult, less-used actor;
Cold Feet
(89, Robert Dornhelm);
Sibling Rivalry
(90, Carl Reiner);
Bright Angel
(91, Michael Fields);
Liebestraum
(91, Mike Figgis);
A League of Their Own
(92, Penny Marshall);
Singles
(92, Cameron Crowe);
Newsies
(92, Kenny Ortega);
Sommersby
(93, Jon Amiel);
Malice
(93, Howard Becker); the dull boyfriend in
Sleepless in Seattle
(93, Nora Ephron);
The Favor
(94, Donald Petrie);
Wyatt Earp
(94, Kasdan); very funny as the stooge husband in
The Last Seduction
(94, John Dahl); the dad in
Casper
(95, Brad Silberling);
Mr. Wrong
(96, Nick Castle); with Sandra Bullock in
While You Were Sleeping
(95, Jon Turteltaub); the President in
Independence Day
(96, Roland Emmerich); staying very cool until
Lost Highway
(97, David Lynch) ended;
The End of Violence
(97, Wim Wenders);
Mistrial
(97, Heywood Gould); on TV, as George in a clever redoing of
It’s a Wonderful Life
called
Merry Christmas, George Bailey
(97, Matthew Diamond);
The Zero Effect
(98, Jake Kasdan);
Lake Placid
(99, Steve Miner);
Brokedown Palace
(99, Jonathan Kaplan);
The Virginian
(00, himself) on TV;
The Guilty
(00, Anthony Waller);
Lucky Numbers
(00, Nora Ephron);
Ignition
(01, Yves Simoneau);
29 Palms
(02, Leonardo Ricagni);
Igby Goes Down
(02, Burr Steers);
Rick
(03, Curtiss Clayton).

He was in
Tiger Cruise
(04, Duwayne Dunham);
The Grudge
(04, Takashi Shimuzu);
Dear Wendy
(05, Thomas Vinterberg);
Scary Movie 4
(06, David Zucker);
Alien Autopsy
(06, Johnny Campbell);
Nobel Son
(07, Randall Miller);
You Kill Me
(07, Dahl);
Surveillance
(08, Jennifer Lynch);
Bottle Shock
(08, Miller);
Phoebe in Wonderland
(08, Daniel Barnz).

Lord David Puttnam
, b. London, 1941
For about ten years—from 1975 to 1985—Puttnam was one of the more adventurous producers in the world. Three times he earned best picture nominations: for
Midnight Express
(78, Alan Parker),
The Killing Fields
(84, Roland Joffe), and
Chariots of Fire
(81, Hugh Hudson), which won the Oscar. These were only the highlights of a record that also included
Melody
(71, Waris Hussein);
The Pied Piper
(72, Jacques Demy);
The Final Programme
(73, Robert Fuest);
Mahler
(73, Ken Russell);
That’ll Be the Day
(74, Claude Whatham); the clever, engaging documentary,
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
(75, Philippe Mora);
Stardust
(75, Michael Apted);
James Dean, the First American Teenager
(75, Ray Connolly);
Lisztomania
(75, Russell);
Bugsy Malone
(76, Parker);
The Duellists
(77, Ridley Scott);
Foxes
(80, Adrian Lyne);
Experience Preferred But Not Essential
(82, Peter Duffell);
Kipperbang
(82, Apted);
Local Hero
(83, Bill Forsyth);
Cal
(84, Pat O’Connor);
Defence of the Realm
(85, David Drury);
Mr. Love
(85, Roy Battersby); and
The Mission
(86, Joffe).

Only a few of these films seem to me indispensable
—The Duellists
and
Local Hero
, say. But producing successfully in Britain is very tough, and Puttnam won big prizes, did well enough at the box office, and encouraged some valuable talents. Still, his strengths were English, and Puttnam was cheerfully disapproving of many things American.

However, in 1986, Coca-Cola invited him to be production head at Columbia. Puttnam handled himself like an outsider. He announced lower budgets, lower salaries, braver pictures, and a lot of opportunities for European directors. Did he ever plan on staying long? Or did he prefer to be a gambler and a challenge? Was it too laborious, or too American, to apply his several worthwhile ideas slowly, with cunning, duplicity, and all the other American methods? He lasted less than two years, and it’s arguable that his rhetoric and his provocation did more damage than good. It’s unlikely that anyone else will ever get such a chance again.

Puttnam was paid off, lavishly. He went back to Britain and taught for a time. Then gradually he slipped back into production and made
Memphis Belle
(90, Michael Caton-Jones);
Being Human
(94, Bill Forsyth);
War of the Buttons
(94, John Roberts);
My Life So Far
(99, Hudson).

In recent years, he has been chancellor of the University of Sunderland and of the Open University.

Q

Dennis Quaid
, b. Houston, Texas, 1954
In an age of heavy-duty stars, whose presence is hardly possible without at least $10 million above the line, there comes into being a second string of known quantities, good-looking guys, reliable and fairly trouble-free performers, as the project slips a notch or two. These fellows don’t do badly, but they lack the crust of vanity or certainty that can lead bigger stars into unmitigated disasters. Thus, by and large, the bench players have an edge and a need that I find more attractive than the hard gloss of stardom. Dennis Quaid is such a figure. He’s been around so long now he isn’t going to surprise many people. Or so you think, until you see his magnificent Doc Holliday in the otherwise languid
Wyatt Earp
(94, Lawrence Kasdan). This is the best Holliday in pictures—a physical and attitudinal transformation—and enough to make Kevin Costner turn to stone (if he hadn’t been there already).